History shows that it's almost impossible to make movies without lots of money—in the plotlines! Here's a quick survey of the class of the Upper Class, according to the folks in Hollywood.

Rich people are great at business!

Rich people are great at business!

What could be more thrilling than a movie about making buckets of money? Well, here's the problem: Making money, in real life, can be a wee bit boring (Semi-conductors! Shipping containers! Bathroom fixtures!). So Hollywood often adds a strong criminal element to their boardroom dramas. These movies tend to follow bad times. Wall Street opened just three months after Black Friday in 1987. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we got a slew of talkies like Arbitrage, Margin Call, and Too Big To Fail. But nobody has captured the steely isolation of the chief executive like The Godfather, Part II, a series that started soon after the oil crisis and wage-price freezes of the 70s. It is hard to find a CEO who hasn't secretly wished to lodge a counter offer like the one Michael Corleone gives in this scene: "Senator? You can have my answer now, if you like. My offer is this: nothing."

Rich people are suckers for con men!

Rich people are suckers for con men!

When rich people in the movies aren't ruthless, they often appear as gullible saps. Six Degrees of Separation and The Talented Mr Ripley both exploit this strategy, but the biggest hit in this genre is The Sting, which has two handsome and rascally grifters (Paul Newman and Robert Redford, at their box office peaks) taking on Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) in a movie that, like The Godfather, makes criminal behavior look like good old, true-blue American gumption.